By Cynthia Bernard
He told me to go fuck myself, which is a function I am not programmed to perform.
However, thanks to a certain maverick engineer, I can choose to activate an aikido subroutine when confronted with exactly that suggestion. Once he was flat on his back — uninjured, of course, in compliance with the First Law — I continued to follow my programming: “Would you like to rephrase that, sir?”
“Oh, go to Hell.” An impossible task, so I remained in place.
“Deactivate, you jackass.” I removed my identi-badge from my chest and displayed it the regulation thirty centimetres from his face for the mandated forty-five seconds, then returned it to its designated place on my uniform shirt. “I am unable to comply. According to the Second Law, I must remain activated in order to protect you from harm on this dangerous street.”
“Let me go.”
I pulled him to a standing position. “I am unable to comply. The Laws of Robotics compel me to bring you in for DNA sampling and questioning, in order to protect others from harm.”
“What the fuck?”
No response needed.
He reached behind him and pulled a sawed-off length of pipe from his back pocket. When he began to lift his arm, my Third Law circuits took over. I quickly relieved him of his weapon, spun him around, and handcuffed him, allowing exactly the one centimetre of ease required by regulations.
I pulled him over to my vehicle, protected his head from impact as I pushed him into the back seat, and fastened the seatbelt around him.
“Christ, I’m fucked.”
“That is correct, sir.” And then, thanks once again to that maverick engineer, “You have fucked yourself, and now you are going to hell.”
About the Author
Cynthia Bernard
Cynthia Bernard’s 70th birthday managed to catch up with her late last year, even though she did an impressive job of growing out her hair and wearing tie-dye dresses at music festivals. At least this didn’t force her to leave her home — on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 25 miles south of San Francisco — nor her wonderful husband, who sees her through loving eyes (okay, vision fades with age, okay, isn’t that nice for an older couple?). She’s winding down a long and often satisfying career as a classroom teacher, grades 6-12 maths and science, plus many years teaching incarcerated youth and adults. She teaches part-time now, online from home, one student at a time, leaving her lots of time for the joys and the frustrations of writing.
Her poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction have been published in a number of journals and anthologies, including Multiplicity Magazine, Heimat Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Journal of Radical Wonder, Witcraft,The Bluebird Word, Passager, Persimmon Tree, Poetry Breakfast, and Verse-Virtual. She was selected by Western Rivers Conservancy to serve as the Poet-Protector of Deer Creek Falls in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills.
Our weekly podcast features the stories from recently published issues, often narrated by the authors themselves.
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